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Adventures in Twitter Censorship [pdf]
- ogig 11y agoOne of my main concerns with mainstream social networks is this kind of subtle censorship/filtering. Some people think their Facebook stream is an accurate representation of their friends and surrounding reality, they are ignorant of the algoritms that decide what they will see and what not.
- methou 11y agoRecently a Chinese copy of twitter, Weibo, decided to implement similar functionality, but their ability in machine learning is very limited, so their lame work has only promoted paid members and threads. In the first week of its introduction, most users has noticed that there's roughly 50% less threads were read by other users. Actually I think theres's big future for this kind of censorship, if performed well, can be hard to detect and hard to test(think about A/B testing). So I disagree with 'subtle', it's just our enemy get smarter.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoIs this censorship or editorial/curation? I've been infuriated by Facebook because I have a local events group on high priority in my feed, but FB has decided I only want to see about one post in five. So I miss a lot of news I want to see. Meanwhile I still get porn posts on the various technology groups I read, even though I keep asking not to see similar content. I'd have no objection to a good AI editor curating my feed. But FB has a very bad AI editor making bad choices for reasons that ignore my interests, and I really don't want that at all.
- marcosdumay 11y agoThe difference is completely in the eye of the beholder. But a huge centralized curator that decides what everybody reads is something people feared for centuries. It does not really matter if its intention is benign.
- SFLemonade 11y agoAbsolutely. And even more dangerous is the perception that there isn't a curator, when there really is one. That is the case with Facebook today.
- username223 11y agoDoes switching it from "top posts" back to "most recent" still fix it, or is even that filtered? They clearly want you to use their "curation," but a bit of fast scrolling and skimming still does a much better job.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoDon't use networks that don't share their code. Don't use networks that hold your data and don't give you raw access to it. Share directly with your friends instead of a large corporation. Edit: Instead of downmods, please post reasons why you should use networks run with secret codes and which suck your data into their proprietary databases.
- itistoday2 11y agoHN is known for its inability to downvote properly. Gave you an upvote. :)
- jsprogrammer 11y agoThanks. I know :) Unfortunately, others have since come and bumped the comment back down.
- krapp 11y agoI didn't downvote you, but I'm not aware of any "network" (by which I assume you mean website or application) that matches the requirements you set. Open source websites simply don't exist - as it's impossible to actually validate that the code running on a server matches whatever source code a company might distribute, and every site and application attempts to limit or control access to your data in some way. Hacker News itself explicitly doesn't share their fork of the Arc forums, and don't allow raw access to your data.
- itistoday2 11y agoThere are plenty of networks that fit this requirement! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10408968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10408968
- krapp 11y agoFair enough, but the entire web doesn't, which makes jsprogrammer's imperative practically impossible if taken at face value, unless one wants to avoid most of modern technological society altogether.
- SFLemonade 11y agoThis so true and a major concern. The next wave of highly effective propaganda and thought control could very easily manifest itself through this. Today, people know better than to blindly believe the news media. If information is coming from a single entity, it could be pushing an agenda, so take it with a grain of salt. We all know that. But when it appears to come from a community, that's entirely different. It seems completely genuine and trustworthy. But what happens when Zuckerberg meets with German political leaders to discuss the silencing of anti-refugee posts on Facebook? We know that the technology exists. If you've ever advertised on Facebook, you've seen how easily one piece of content can be given massive priority while others can go quietly ignored. But that's not how it seems to the user. It just seems like all of their friends are thinking one way....so they should too. There are massive implications to this.
- DasIch 11y agoGermany does not intend to silence anti-refugee posts. Germany wants to stop illegal incitement of hatred. Such as promoting or even threatening to burn down asylum centers, to hurt or even kill refugees and those that help them. Those are not just words, asylum centers are being burned to the ground, refugees are attacked, just recently some were killed on the border the EU, just yesterday someone tried and almost suceeded in killing a politician who helped refugees. You have to be insane to support this as free speech unless you support these nazis.
- teddyh 11y ago“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.” — Widely attributed to H. L. Mencken
- PavlovsCat 11y agoWould HN be better if personal insults and death threats were allowed, would it improve the exchange of ideas and the expression of opinions?
- itistoday2 11y agoI've documented evidence of Twitter censorship; what likely amounts to millions of tweet-replies. This seems to be used to shape perceptions and opinions on twitter in at mass-scale: https://twitter.com/taoeffect/status/651215054235242497 https://twitter.com/taoeffect/status/651215054235242497 I've now registered my username on Kloak as @greg, and am recommending to all my friends to move off of Twitter to similar networks. Here are some networks to ditch twitter for: - SpiderOak's Kloak (in beta): https://spideroak.com/solutions/kloak https://spideroak.com/solutions/kloak - Indie's Hearbeat (in alpha): https://ind.ie/ https://ind.ie/ - Twister: http://twister.net.co/ http://twister.net.co/ - Vole: http://vole.cc/ http://vole.cc/ Bye Orwell, won't be seeing you in the land of free speech!
- hellbanner 11y agoI'm seeing this Retweet from the US. What's going on?
- kylnew 11y agoThe writer seemed to be suggesting the censorship could be temporary, and lifted after no longer fresh and less likely to be retweeted. Also, though probably not true in your case, it sounds like actively following the account means these rules don't apply.
- 0x49 11y agoIm more concerned with social censorship and the mob mentality that seems to be determining justice. If you say something that is not politically correct or against the current narrative, you will get fired/bullied/harrassed/silenced/all three. Without honesty, there will be no progress. I shouldnt be afraid of posting my opinions and expressing my freedom of speech because i might lose my livelihood. But its the sad reality.
- task_queue 11y agoYou are in essence saying there shouldn't be social consequences for speech.
- mushtifaha 11y agoThe consequences for speech should resemble an asymptote, always approaching zero.
- task_queue 11y agoConsequences of speech are people's thoughts or reactions to speech. Where does someone's right to say what they want without consequence end and my right to have a thought or reaction to what I heard begin? Your right to speak your opinion coexists with people's right to have a reaction. This might be socially inconvenient, but that has always been the reality. Nothing has changed because the avenue expression is online, just the audience and availability of your speech.
- csandreasen 11y agoThe internet has created a weird environment where repercussions for socially unacceptable speech (even if taken completely out of context) can be dramatically more severe than any harm that was caused by the original speaker. In general, a distasteful tweet or Facebook post shouldn't cost someone their job, make them a target for anonymous threats or make them fear interacting with society at large any more than it would have if the message had just been spoken. There was a good piece on NPR recently that explored a number of examples: http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=440286008 http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...
- username223 11y agoIt seems like Twitter is experimenting with hell-banning. This is hardly a new evil.
- pmlnr 11y agoYet another situation to highlight http://indiewebcamp.com/webmention http://indiewebcamp.com/webmention Circumventing that would be near impossible.
- netik 11y agoAll of you are misinterpreting Twitter's "features" here. Most likely the root cause of this is an internal feature at Twitter called "per-country takedown." If someone from Germany asked (and had a valid court order) that the Tweet be taken down for German users, then Twitter has the ability to disable the Tweet for people coming from German IPs. I don't agree with this, I lobbied heavily against it while I worked there to no avail, but it's a solid explanation for why you wouldn't be able to see a Tweet in different regions.
- epeus 11y agowhen that was announced they said it would show that the tweets had been withheld: https://blog.twitter.com/2012/tweets-still-must-flow https://blog.twitter.com/2012/tweets-still-must-flow ”Q: What will people see if content is withheld? A: If people are located in a country where a Tweet or account has been withheld and they try to view it, they will see a alert box that says “Tweet withheld” or “@Username withheld” in place of the affected Tweet or account.” Did that policy change?
- logic 11y agoepeus is right; I'm not at Twitter anymore either, but the last time I looked at this, per-country takedowns were clearly labeled as such (ie. you hit the tweet from the blocked country, you get clear "this isn't visible to you" messaging). My honest guess? Cache coherency is hard, man.
- logic 11y agoAmusing side-conversation we're having right now: apparently my reply above didn't show up immediately for some folks. Obviously, Hacker News is censoring me.
- 6t6t6 11y agoThanks! You spared me from downloading the PDF...
- olefoo 11y agoThis is not at all surprising in that censorship is one of the few viable business models for a 'free-to-play' social network. Defusing and diffusing social movements before they get traction is something many organizations with money are going to find appealing whether or not it works... Facebook understands this quite well and is the canonical example of the model; but if you don't think that "Steering the conversation" is a core value proposition for privately operated social networks ( including Hacker News ) that are free to the general public; you are naive.
- alfiedotwtf 11y ago“You can say what you like but no one will hear you. And also, you'll think no one cared, so you'll give up trying.” Isn't this what JTRIG's "Online Covert Operations" is all about? https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/